Mad Matthewz
Director/writer Men Without Jobs

Looking at the young man reclining on a couch in the Media Center of the Los Angeles Film Festival you'd be apt to say that he looked relaxed, composed, at ease, friendly, maybe even delighted. So, how did this seemingly unflappable dude get stuck with a name like Mad.

"I remember it well," recalls Mad Matthewz, the writer-director of the urban slacker comedy Men Without Jobs. "It was my 13th birthday and one of my buddies just looked at me and said, 'you look like a madman.' It just stuck and over the years it got shortened. It used to bother me," adds the man christened Darren, "but I kinda like it now because people remember it. You can't imagine how my real name's been mangled over the years."

Matthewz went to film school at Purchase in upstate New York and like so many grads found himself scrambling for work when he returned home to the Big Apple. The paying gigs were the odd music videos or industrials he could wrangle. But on the side, he'd always manage to make a short and for four years running he had a selection in the annual Urbanworld fest in Manhattan.

Perhaps ironically, when it came time to premiere his first feature, the venue was across town at the TriBeCa festival.

"It was a great experience and not simply because the audience response was incredible," he says. "I can feel the people responding to the story and what it said to me was this is what it's about. Do the film you want to do by any means necessary. Don't do someone else's movie just because it's the easier way."

Men Without Jobs certainly appears to reflect the gentle but thoughtful nature Matthewz conveys in person. It's funny in a natural uncontrived way with a serious undertone and characters that can't help but be charming. His two lead characters may give off the impression that they're more talk than action but when it comes time to perform they have the goods. Any more detail would spoil the fun he concocts.

He also knows that luck was a significant factor in getting his film made. He'd finished the script three years ago and when he started shopping it around the offers slowly trickle in but he describes them as universally "lousy." The money was no good or they didn't want him to direct or they wanted him to make it "more urban." The last condition makes him laugh because what people wanted was something broader, obvious and not in any way grounded in reality.

Things turned around when his brother ran into an old friend who had become a lawyer and agreed to take Mad on as a client. He also was interested in getting involved in entertainment ventures and when he became frustrated by the deals on the table turned to Matthewz and said he'd finance the whole thing personally.

"I was stunned but wasn't about to say no," he says. Now he's hoping that trust can be paid back with a pending distribution deal.

"You know when I was still a kid I saw She's Gotta Have It and it changed my life," notes Matthewz. "I mean here was a black film that had people I recognized as not a bunch of crazy stereotypes. I knew I wanted to make films then and I could see that it was possible to do stories that weren't about macho guys or hustlers or studs. That was very important."

Matthewz gets close to being mad when he thinks of films on the order of Soul Plane that he labels as "irresponsible." Even a more restrained film like Barbershop bothers him because of the stereotypes it reinforces. He says it probably wouldn't bother him if there were diversity in movies being produced about African Americans. Though he can't point to anything, he believes both the audience and the filmmakers are tired of the inane comedies and characters of these films.

"Everything goes in cycles and I think we're ready to transcend the type of movies we've seen about Black Americans in the past decade. We're ready for films by, for and about us and I'd like my shot to change a few lives just like Spike Lee did for me."

- by Leonard Klady